You Tube Goes 4K Using VP-9

Posted by
Sam Churchill
on
January 2nd, 2014

YouTube will be demonstrating 4K video at CES next week, reports GigaOm. But the ultra high-definition streaming will be based on VP9, a new royalty-free codec that Google has been developing as an alternative to the H.265 video codec that’s at the core of many other 4K implementations.

Google’s VP8 video codec was launched in 2010. It was supposed to become the default format for plugin-free video streaming, with Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers backing VP8 as the video format for HTML5 and for web video calling using WebRTC. But vested interests in video formats like H.264 largely kept it in the dark.